The present disclosure relates to supersonic aircraft design, and more specifically, to a computer-implemented sonic boom prediction method for use in designing a supersonic aircraft.
A sonic boom is sound associated with shock waves created when an object travels through air faster than the speed of sound. It is one of the problems that need to be accounted for in the design of aircrafts that travel at supersonic speed. Generally, there are concerns about weight, size, complexity, reliability, cost, and concerns related to performance, but noise suppression for supersonic aircrafts is one of the more critical technical problems to be solved in making an environmentally acceptable commercial supersonic aircraft. Sonic booms need to be minimized in order to reduce or eliminate public annoyance from supersonic flight over land.
The design of supersonic aircrafts has been hindered due to limitations in the current models for sonic boom prediction. A near-field pressure distribution at a distance sufficiently far away from the aircraft is needed for accurate ground signature prediction. Existing near-field sonic boom prediction methods use conventional general purpose computational fluid dynamics (CFD) approaches that rely on a computational mesh to cover the large near-field domain. The finer the mesh, the greater the number of points generated for CFD analysis, and thus, a more accurate sonic boom prediction. However, as the number of points generated increases, the time it takes to calculate the CFD solution increases exponentially. Thus, in order for CFD approaches to be used practically in the sonic boom prediction methods, a coarser mesh or a reduced near-field domain is applied at the expense of accuracy.